For more than four years, a Chicago investment adviser secretly logged into his clients’ brokerage accounts without their knowledge, intercepted their security codes, and approved his own fake fees on their behalf while they had no idea it was happening.

How P/E Capital Plundered Client Accounts for Years

An SEC complaint exposes a four-year scheme of account hijacking, identity theft, and silent fee extraction targeting over 220 clients — many of them Filipino immigrants trusting someone they believed was looking out for them.

The Non-Financial Ledger

The dollar figures are damning enough. But the source material reveals something worse: a choreographed violation of personal trust, repeated over and over again, against people who had handed over the keys to their financial lives.

They Didn’t Just Steal Money. They Stole the Illusion of Safety.

P/E Capital’s client base was composed mostly of people of Filipino descent, living either in the Philippines or the United States. The SEC complaint notes explicitly that “many of P/E Capital’s clients are not experienced investors.” These were people who sought out a professional because they did not feel equipped to navigate financial markets alone. They paid for expertise, guidance, and above all, protection. Prisno gave them a predator instead.

The betrayal began at the very moment a client signed up. According to the SEC complaint, Defendants created the client’s username, password, and account security questions for them when setting up their brokerage account. This is the kind of thing a trusted adviser does as a service, handling the technical setup on behalf of someone who might not be comfortable doing it alone. Prisno weaponized that act of apparent helpfulness. While some clients changed their passwords, others kept the ones Prisno gave them, and he kept a copy.

Consider what multifactor authentication is supposed to do. It is a security feature designed on the explicit premise that even if someone steals your password, they still cannot access your account without a code sent to a device only you control. Prisno dismantled that protection from the inside. P/E Capital submitted the client’s own phone number and email address to the brokerage, but substituted contact information under Prisno’s control instead. The client had no idea the security texts were going to someone else. The entire architecture of digital safety that modern banking depends on was turned against the people it was supposed to protect.

Client A: Fees That Tripled Overnight Without a Word

Client A joined P/E Capital in 2020. The SEC complaint states he “was not aware he would pay any fees other than the Advisory Fee and did not agree to Added Fees.” That was not a misunderstanding or an oversight. Prisno charged him over $10,000 (roughly the equivalent of five months of grocery bills for a family of four) in Added Fees that tripled the total amount he paid. Client A did not see a different line item. He did not receive a disclosure. He received no explanation. The fees simply disappeared from his account.

Client B’s situation is even more clinical in its cruelty. On September 24, 2019, P/E Capital used its adviser login to request authorization for Added Fees on Client B’s account. The complaint documents that “two days later someone logged into Client B’s account, from the same IP address as the person at P/E Capital who used the Adviser Login to request the Added Fees, and approved the request.” The same IP address. The same person who asked for the fee then logged in as the client and approved it for themselves. Client B “never so much as saw, let alone approved, the fee request.”

Client C: Their Own Phone Number Was the Trap

Client C’s account opened in October 2020 with the 2.4% Advisory Fee listed as the only charge. The SEC complaint reveals that “Prisno’s phone number was set for multi-factor authentication.” Read that again. A client opened an investment account, and without their knowledge, the account’s security verification code went directly to their adviser’s phone. Every time the account needed to verify a login, Prisno received the confirmation text. The client’s security was Prisno’s access key. A Quarterly Fee Cap was later added in March 2021, raised again in November 2021, and neither approval came from Client C.

The scale of this identity substitution is staggering. The SEC complaint documents that for at least 167 separate Quarterly Fee Cap changes across the entire client base, both the fee request from the adviser login and the purported client approval originated from the same IP address. One hundred and sixty-seven times. That is not an accident or a systems glitch. That is a production line of fraud, running on schedule, quarter after quarter, for years.

The scheme only stopped because Brokerage Firm A terminated P/E Capital’s advisory account in or around August 2023. Prisno did not stop because he had a crisis of conscience. He did not stop because a client caught him. He stopped because the brokerage shut the door. In over four years of stealing from more than 220 people, not a single internal mechanism at P/E Capital produced a correction. Prisno was the CEO. He was also the Chief Compliance Officer. He was the person responsible for making sure none of this happened, and he was the person making it happen.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Legal Receipts

These are direct quotations from the SEC’s filed complaint. Nothing has been paraphrased. Read them slowly.

“Defendants oftentimes did so by signing in to their clients’ brokerage accounts using their clients’ login credentials — frequently without their clients’ knowledge or consent — and then routing multifactor authentication texts to phone numbers under Defendants’ control.” SEC Complaint, Paragraph 2

“While P/E Capital disclosed Advisory Fees of 2% or 2.4%, it actually charged these clients an average of more than 7% of assets under management — totaling more than $2.4 million in Added Fees charged to at least 220 client accounts. These Added fees were not disclosed to clients in P/E Capital’s Brochure or marketing materials.” SEC Complaint, Paragraph 20

“In all, for at least 167 Quarterly Fee Cap changes, both the fee request from the Adviser Login and the purported fee approval from the Client Login originated from the same IP address.” SEC Complaint, Paragraph 25

“Client B never so much as saw — let alone approved — the fee request.” SEC Complaint, Paragraph 23

“Prisno filed a Form ADV for Ashtree claiming it had $5 million in assets under management and 94 clients. Prisno did so despite knowing that Ashtree was not operational, had zero clients, and zero assets under management.” SEC Complaint, Paragraph 38

“Defendants acted with scienter. At the time Defendants charged their advisory clients inflated, unauthorized, undisclosed, and unearned fees, Defendants knew or recklessly disregarded that their representations to prospective advisory clients regarding the fees charged to clients’ accounts were false, misleading, and omitted material information.” SEC Complaint, Paragraph 36

The Cost of a Life: By the Numbers

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality: The Deliberate Targeting of Financially Vulnerable People

The SEC complaint explicitly identifies P/E Capital’s client base as “most of whom are of Filipino descent and live either in the Philippines or the United States,” and adds that “many of P/E Capital’s clients are not experienced investors.” This is not incidental background. The source material describes the precise demographic profile of the people Prisno chose to exploit. Inexperienced investors, many of them immigrants or diaspora members, are people who depend most heavily on the honesty of a financial adviser because they have the least ability to detect when something is wrong.

The fee structure itself reveals the targeting logic. Clients were told they were paying 2% to 2.4% of their assets per year. That is a steep rate already, but it is within the range that a trusting person might accept from an adviser who seemed credible. The hidden rate averaged above 7%. For someone with $50,000 invested, the disclosed annual fee would be $1,000 to $1,200. The actual secret fee burden pushed that to $3,500 or more per year, quietly draining accounts that likely represented years of careful saving.

Between July 2021 and January 2025, P/E Capital’s reported assets under management dropped from $40.5 million (a sum that could fund full scholarships for approximately 1,350 community college students for a year) to $20.5 million (still enough to fund 683 of those same scholarships). That is a $20 million decline in client assets managed. The complaint does not attribute this entirely to the scheme, but the trajectory documents what happens to a client base when its adviser is systematically extracting three times the disclosed fee rate for years.

The post-scheme maneuver with Ashtree Block Ventures makes the economic danger clearer. After Brokerage Firm A shut P/E Capital out in 2023, Prisno began transitioning clients to Ashtree, a new entity he controlled. He registered Ashtree with the SEC as an “internet adviser” specifically to use the SEC’s credibility as a marketing tool, filing paperwork that falsely claimed $5 million in assets under management and 94 clients when the firm had zero of either. Prisno’s instinct was not to stop. His instinct was to find a new container for the same scheme, using the same clients.

When the Brokerage Closed the Door, He Built a New One

The Ashtree Fraud: Using the SEC’s Own Name as a Lure

Prisno registered Ashtree Block Ventures LLC with the SEC as an “internet adviser” between September 2022 and March 2024 because, in the SEC’s own words, “he hoped the SEC’s imprimatur would attract and retain investors and clients.” He filed regulatory paperwork claiming $5 million in assets under management and 94 clients. Every number on that form was fabricated. Ashtree had zero clients and zero assets.

When SEC staff told Prisno that Ashtree did not qualify for the internet adviser registration category, he did not immediately withdraw. He only withdrew after SEC staff told him the agency would withdraw the registration for him. At no point in this sequence did Prisno take voluntary corrective action. Every move was forced.

The complaint’s timeline makes the purpose transparent: P/E Capital’s misconduct at Brokerage Firm A stopped because the brokerage terminated the account around August 2023. Ashtree’s registration effort was already underway by September 2022. Prisno was building the escape route before the door closed.

The Compliance Officer Was the Criminal

Prisno served simultaneously as CEO and Chief Compliance Officer of P/E Capital. In the investment advisory industry, the compliance officer holds a specific legal duty: ensure the firm operates within the law. The person responsible for detecting and stopping fee fraud was the person committing it. That dual role is not just ironic. It is the architectural flaw that made four years of undetected systematic theft possible.

P/E Capital signed its clients into an advisory relationship that carried, in the complaint’s language, “affirmative duties of utmost good faith, care, loyalty, full and fair disclosure of all material facts, and to act in the client’s best interest.” Prisno signed every amendment to P/E Capital’s Form ADV during the relevant period. He signed the official disclosures telling clients they owed 2% to 2.4%. He signed them knowing he was taking more than three times that amount from their accounts every quarter.